Former Infosys BPO honcho Asheesh Mehra resigns from company to start own venture Antworks

"There’s a huge amount of transformation taking place right now,” said Mehra. Wednesday is the Infosys vicepresident’s last day at the company.Biswarup Gooptu | ET Bureau | Updated: June 11, 2015, 11:18 IST

"There's a huge amount of transformation taking place right now," said Mehra. Wednesday is the Infosys vicepresident's last day at the company.Asheesh Mehra, who headed information technology giant Infosys Technologies’ BPO operations in the Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East regions, has resigned from the company, to start his own venture.

Mehra, who has spent more than seven years with the Bengaluru-headquartered IT services behemoth, has launched Antworks, a business process outsourcing and technology startup catering to the healthcare and financial services industry.

The startup, which has been co-founded with former Tata Consultancy Services, Capita and WNS senior executive Govind Sandhu earlier this year, will be headquartered in Singapore, and will have three delivery centres in India, with the first one coming up in Pune later this month.

“It’s an exciting time for the Indian startup ecosystem. Individuals are summoning up the courage to step out and build ventures from ground up. There’s a huge amount of transformation taking place right now,” said Mehra. Wednesday is Infosys Vice-President’s last day at the company.

Antworks, which has founded with seed capital of $8 million (about Rs 51 crore), will offer end-to-end services to major hospital chains, insurance providers as well as speciality clinics in the healthcare domain. In the financial services side, it will cater to medium and small financial institutions such as agricultural banks, mortgage providers and refinancing institutions.

“Healthcare is an extremely resilient sector, where we plan on offering services, such as patient management, billing services, disease management, use predictive analytics to offer preventive management and care,” Mehra said.

“We will provide financial technology services to those that the markets have ignored, but where we feel there are tremendous opportunities,” said Mehra, adding that the company will also scout for opportunities in emerging geographies such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Philippines.

Antworks, according to Mehra, is also in the process of making its first acquisition in the US, which should be announced within the next three months. Mehra is the latest senior Infosys executive to resign from the company in the last two years.

The company, which has gone through a significant churn in management, has seen its former Chief Financial Officer V. Balakrishnan (Bala), its former global head of manufacturing Ashok Vemuri and Stephen Pratt, its former head of utilities and resources for North America, among others, put in their papers.

Of them, Bala is the only one to have a strong connect to country’s startup ecosystem, having launched Exfinity Fund, a Rs 100 crore early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm.